Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #28

Growth in delegated signing, Testnet reset Wednesday, new Horizon release.

Hey everyone! Welcome to another issue of the Stellar Dev Digest, a weekly recap of all things related to the development of the Stellar Network.

What is Stellar? Stellar is a platform that connects banks, payment systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.

Reminder 👉 The next Stellar testnet reset is scheduled for this Wednesday, 01/29/20 at 0900 UTC. If you’re in the middle of a test project, take some time now to figure out what you need to do to recreate it. You can read about how the stellar.org team recovers from a testnet reset here. More info and best practices for using the testnet are here.

💭 We are also starting a new format this week so let me know if you have any feedback!

News & Posts of the Week

• African fintech firm Flutterwave raises $35M in a Series B round. They actively maintain a Stellar integration for cross-border remittances between Europe and Nigeria. — Read the TechCrunch article here.
• Mister Ticot, creator of Cosmic.link, put out a blog post detailing the growth of delegated signing in the Stellar ecosystem. Delegated signing improves security by allowing users to sign transactions on multiple Stellar apps using a single wallet. It also means users don’t have to copy and paste private keys all over the place, which can help protect them from malicious sites and scams. — Read more here.
• Stellar Community Podcast Ep. 2 is out! It features a conversation with Paul Selden of StellarGuard about layered security.— Listen here.
• COO of SDF, Jason Chlipala, took a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss taking digital assets mainstream with the Global Blockchain Business Council.
• SDF is hosting a “Build Your Own Stellar Wallet” workshop in San Francisco on February 19. It’ll cover everything you need to know to build a fully-functional Stellar wallet. — RSVP here.

Application of the Week

This week I’m featuring Testnet.ai — An Easy Stellar Testnet Token Manager!

Stop wasting development cycles on your testnet tokens. We’ve taken the pain out of creating and managing assets on the Stellar network.

The testnet reset is in two days. A reset clears all testnet accounts, balances, assets, and offers. To make it easier for projects to recover, Testnet.ai created a tool that allows you to issue and delete custom assets, create and customize market-making strategies, recreate assets and markets after a reset, and more.

You can find their full list of features and tools here.

Releases and Updates

Remember that new Horizon ingestion engine we started testing a while back? Well, the Horizon 1.0.0 Alpha was released Friday, and it’s a preview of what things will be like when that new ingestion engine is switched on.

It’s much more efficient and enables some key new features including:

• A set of important new endpoints (found here), many of which just weren’t possible with the previous ingestion architecture.
• An in-memory order book graph for rapid querying.
• The ability to run parallel ingestion over multiple Horizon hosts, improving service availability for production deployments.

The new engine resolves multiple issues that were present in the old system such as:

• Horizon’s coupling to Stellar-Core’s database is dramatically reduced.
• Data inconsistency due to lag between endpoints is eliminated.
• Slow endpoints (path-finding for example) are now speedy.

With all these new features, SDKs will have some breaking changes to prepare for and new features to implement. Adolfo, software engineer at SDF, took the time to open up issues on all of the SDKs detailing how to get caught up. If you’re looking to get your hands dirty you can find the full list here! You can find a testing guide for the new ingestion system here.

Active Discussions

💬 The hot topic on the dev mailing list this week continues to be the Account Memo Requirements SEP.

I’ve mentioned it over the last several weeks, but the goal is to provide a standard way to define transaction memo requirements for incoming payments.

This week Nicolas Barry has introduced a different solution that involves creating a standard way of encoding destination + transaction modifiers. This would pass the handling of “multiplexed accounts” to Stellar SDKs.

For example, a user would simply copy / paste an encoded memo + address that would look like this:1234@GDTZFTMBT2MZOVKZOVM2ECL3P.. while the SDK handles separating the memo from the address before building the transaction.

It seems like there are a lot of potential solutions to the memo problem, and consensus is still forming about which one is best. We’d love to hear how you might solve it — join the discussion.

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Did I Miss Something?

If you found that something from this issue is missing or inaccurate reach out to me (kolten) on Keybase and I’ll make sure to fix it 👍